Category: Inspiration

A working writer can’t wait for inspiration. The stereotype of a writer sitting with pen in hand, eyes rolled heavenward while waiting for “The Muse” to descend, bears little resemblance to reality. Waiting for inspiration just leads to blank pages and frustration.

Just ask Jack London, who advised writers, “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.”

Rather than wait for divine inspiration, we keep our clubs at the ready. We have hundreds of books with writing prompts and exercises. Take Holly Lisle’s frankly-named book Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love AND Money.

Below is an old poem I wrote about a violent Muse encounter. It still makes me smile. (No writers or Muses were actually harmed in the writing of this poem.)

Why I Don’t Walk So Good Anymore:
The Minor Regional Writer Tells All

Well, I was writing.
And the words were coming
fast as a cat with its tail on fire,
big as life, bright as spring, thick
as Jesus’s great big gobs of sweat
when he talked to God in the garden.

Then I saw Her, standing at my chair,
her hand all chummy on my shoulder,
and felt her carbon-sweet breath at my ear.
She had big yellow wings and a long white robe
under a flannel shirt with cowboy boots
poking silver tips out under the hem.

I knew I’d found my muse.

She smiled, caught in the act, and rose
those big gold wings fanned out for takeoff.
I knew she’d be gone, lickety-split, so I caught
her by the wrist. Ever wonder why
nobody grabs onto a muse? Well,
I saw that left hook coming and reckoned
I’d figured it out.

The rest of the night is hazy. I reached
for her neck; she reached for mine.
Her wings swept my shelves clean
when I tackled her to the floor. Feathers flew
like a live duck in a blender. She hissed
and squawked and swore I’d never write again,
but her hand smacked my thigh instead of my arm,
and numbness seeped through to the bone.

I held on. She shook me like a spider
on a wet rag. I dug in my nails
until her ink-blood rose. We grappled
through grit and grime and fist-sized dustballs,
until I got her. I got the Muse by the throat,
got my hands on the pulse of Art itself,
and I began to squeeze.

That’s when she brained me
with my Bill Shakespeare lunchbox.

And I saw galaxies and whirlwinds
and those dustballs spinning loops in the cosmos
and about three or four of Her ascending
into a blaze of glory and little singing birdies.

When I came to, my lunchbox was busted.
But I haven’t stopped writing since.

Revised from publication in The Ampersand, Spring 1996.

Writing Prompt:
Your Own Inspired Encounter

What would your Muse(s) look like? Try to imagine them as they would appear to you. What are they wearing? What do they smell like? Do they speak, sing, nod along with your work? Have some fun with this one!